Weak words & wrong weapons

While we throw our weight around militarily, undermining our economy and moral standing in the world in the process, we're surrendering important ground in the current global struggle: language.

Recent government policy memoranda, circulating through the national counter-terrorism and diplomatic community, establishes a new "speech code" for the lexicon in the war on terror, as reported by the Associated Press and now available in
the public domain. These new "speech codes" recommended that analysts and policy makers avoid the terms jihad or jihadist or mujhadid or "al-Qaida movement" and replace them with "extremists" and by extension other non-specific terms. ...

This is more than simply dancing on the pinhead of cultural sensitivity-words have meaning, ideas have consequences. This policy is a strategic collapse. It does nothing to improve our strategic comprehension of the threat or improve our foreign strategic communications; in fact it reinforces existing conceptual problems and risks confusing our messaging with our own actual knowledge of the jihadist threat...

Our enemy says he is fighting jihad warfare to extend the Islamic faith; the basis of that claim rests on his exegesis of Quranic and Islamic Law injunctions. Irrespective of whether we or other Muslims accept or deny the legitimacy of his claim, if that is his stated doctrine, then that is the doctrine we must study and comprehend. That is the doctrine that will provide the indicators and warnings of future threats, that is the basis of our threat model.
That fact that other Muslims do not engage in violent jihad bears no relevance to our problem set or the analysis of those who do; it is a distraction and ancillary information that does not contribute to the threat model or understanding the enemy.
The fact is we have already so nuanced this war that we have failed to complete those required analyses. Our national security strategies and plans are so nuanced now as to be useless in terms of understanding the threat, defining it, clarifying it, modeling it. Read them, see if you can distill the enemy and orient on a clear objective. Even in our own strategic planning documents we admit to ourselves that we don't agree on the threat.

Read the whole piece. The most effective military deception is the one an enemy imposes on himself through false assumptions, mirror imaging and wishful thinking. It doesn't help there are plenty of organizations in the West quite willing to aid us in that effort. There's no point acting like a bull in a china shop around the world when we can't even openly define what the problem is, much less the best means to counter it.